[Bups-dis] Cavarero and Narrative Identity

[Amanda Montgomery]

Hi everyone,

In a couple of weeks I’ve to do a presentation for a course on self-identity, specifically looking at the nature of contemporary narrative theory and some of its criticisms. As I’m just starting out on the research for this I thought I’d post a quick piece outlining the ideas and hopefully getting feedback on what people think.

Narrative identity has emerged from the background of the problem of identity of self through time. Obviously this has been the subject of much philosophical investigation such as that of Locke, who attempts to solve the problem of self-identity and the paradox of change by presenting the continuity of memory as the criteria for a subject being one and the same subject over the course of a lifetime. However while such theories deal with the nature of an object retaining identity, an interesting criticism of this is that in attempting to define what an object is and it’s retention of it’s identity as that object, when this is applied to persons it ignores the features of the individual that comprise their nature as unique selves. So while concepts of continued identity deal with the problem of what I am through time and attempt to show that essential qualities that constitute self-identity, these general qualities do not allow a specific personhood to emerge. For example, while we could say that Plato remained Plato throughout his lifetime because Plato at birth and Plato at death meet whatever criteria for diachronic identity you want to give, this still doesn’t answer the important question of who, rather than what, Plato was as a person.

Narrative philosophy is extensive but I’m mainly focussing on arguments claiming narrative identity can be a method of identification that deals with who a person is. The thinker I’ve been interested in is Adriana Cavarero, who looks at the importance of narrative from a more external perspective, from which the self emerges and is constructed by the stories and narratives we tell about it. I’m aware a more well-known stance is probably with regards to narrative self-conception as expounded by Dennett and Ricoeur among many others, however I think Cavarero’s stance is more radical than this in that it removes the focal point of narrative from the autobiographical nature of one’s own story and self-identity, instead placing it in the external, the biography that we are given by others. This isn’t to deny that we desire to tell stories about ourselves to others, or to understand ourselves through our own stories, but states that who we are can never fully be known to us and only begins to emerge in the biography that we leave behind. Here the authority to articulate who we are is denied to us as the protagonists of our lives (which are essentially a stories without authors), but instead picked up and mapped out by people after death. This in itself is quite a step in that it would seem that in telling and writing stories about, for example, Wittgenstein, we in fact know who he is more than he did himself. The importance in this theory is in knowing the overall structure and development of a life from beginning to end and in doing so outline the essence of who a person is, an ability denied to us from the internal perspective we have of ourselves. We can never have an overview of the course of our life but are instead entrenched in the living of it, and in this sense autobiography is an impossible task, but one we partake in as a way of trying to know ourselves from the position of another and to reflect on ourselves as though we were another.

At this point there could be various criticisms such as the widely varying nature of biographical works on characters like Wittgenstein and that there would be as many Wittgensteins as biographical perspectives were this to be the case, however Cavarero doesn’t seem to be arguing that we can entirely know a person at all, simply that we can get at a better idea of them from a biographical or storytelling perspective than from actually being them. However is this move from privileging the first person perspective to the objective third person perspective justified? After all when we believe we know someone, we aren’t merely talking about knowing where they went to school and how they became a professor, even if this leads us to understanding their life in a more unified and meaningful form, since often we also feel the need to understand how they think and the ways in which they see the world. While we can get an overall idea of the acts during a lifetime, much of biography also attempts to engage the reader with the character, not merely as protagonist, but with speculation on the nature of their internal experiences.

However a problem with this is that while trying to know who someone is ‘from the inside’ can be defended, I don’t know if in practicality it is what we would qualify as knowing someone in any more than biased form. What I mean by this is that when I want to get to know who someone is, while I might read their autobiography I would also qualify it with the writings or stories of someone near to them or who had researched their life and the way they interacted with others. There can be fuller consensus and understanding in doing this than in accepting the somewhat closeted self-reflective view within autobiography.

The difficulty comes when applying this to our own lives as most of us probably think we know ourselves better than others will after our death. Cavarero is arguing that this is not the case and that our desire to hear about ourselves as if from other people’s perspectives by retelling our own story, we are attempting to gain a fuller sense of who we are. The question here is whether we can ever fully trace the meaning in our own lives or if this is the task left for others, and if it is this overall meaning that constitutes who we are.

Anyway I’m aware I’ve gone on a bit of a rant so I’ll round things up at this. It's quite a literary argument and is a philosopher that is new to me so I’m having to represent her very crudely here but I recommend reading her book if you’re interested. Any thoughts on this theory or others on narrative identity will be helpful. The main difficulty is going to be speaking to a room of people about it…

Thanks,

Amanda